The exhibition has been curated by the expert Vicenç Altaió and counts on the participation of the film maker Albert Serra; the art curator, Hans Ulrich Obrist; the director of the Museums Dalí , Montse Aguer; the director of the Miró Foundation, Rosa Maria Malet, and the cultural consultant and art curator, Llucià Homs.
The aim of the exhibition is to penetrate into the world of dreams, an essential element of the human dimension, as so many great writers, philosophers and scientists have shown throughout history. On the other hand, dreams have also been fundamental in the creative process of artists. And this is precisely the backbone of the project we are now presenting: how do artists interpret their dreams, to which extent are they relevant to their work, in how many different forms can dreams be brought to the visual arts. The starting point of the exhibition are two literary works: Trajectoire du rêve (1938), as the origin of the incursion of that which is oneiric and fantastic into the art world, and Dreams (1999), as evidence for the prevalence of dreams in our contemporaneity.

In the words of the curator, Vicenç Altaió: “The exploration begins with the paradigm shift that took place in the arts after the First World War. Dada, born on the barricades of dissident art, in cabaret, in the popular and grotesque underworld, confronted the norms of respectability with violence and arbitrary playfulness. Never more would represented reality be harmonious, or misleading; and art, sceptical of great values, defected from the academy and the canon.”

Dreams became a big well from which one could live subjectively an “other reality”, a radically individual adventure and one of avant-garde group that participates in the exploration of the inner world and that, together with the poetry whose origins lie in the irrational and the instincts, and the science of myth, caused a revolt against harmony and idealism. Forms and method were taken from dreams, as illustrates the work of the artists represented in the exhibition: Dalí, Picasso, Miró, Magritte, Calder, Domínguez, Chagall, Tàpies, Duchamp, Hamilton, Ponç and Brossa.

In recent years the little-known research group Forensic Architecture began using novel research methods to undertake a series of investigations into human rights abuses. While providing crucial evidence for international courts and working with a wide range of activist groups, NGOs, Amnesty International and the UN, Forensic Architecture has not only shed new light on human rights violations and state crimes across the globe, it has also given rise to a new form of investigative practice, to which it has given its name. The group uses architecture as a methodological device with which to investigate armed conflicts and environmental destruction, and to cross-reference multiple other evidence sources such as new media, remote sensing, material investigation and witness testimony. This exhibition introduces the practice, outlining its origins, history, assumptions, potential and double binds. With these investigations and the critical texts that accompany them, Forensic Architecture examines how public truth is produced, technologically, architecturally and aesthetically; how it can be used to confront state propaganda and secrets; and how to expose newer forms of state violence.

Pioneer in the 1970s of the use of video as a tool for socio-political analysis, Martha Rosler (New York, 1943) continues to question the Western way of life. With an internationally established career spanning almost fifty years, her work is a critical analysis of the myths and realities of contemporary culture. Rosler incorporates her literary studies and her interest in textuality to a visual oeuvre that relates the direct language of Pop Art to the experimental narrative forms of happenings and avant-garde theatre and cinema.

Including performance, photography, installation and essays, Rosler’s work is best known for her video productions. MACBA Collection. Martha Rosler: God Bless America! focuses on this type of work through a significant collection of video pieces from the seventies to 2006 belonging to the MACBA Collection. Together with anti-war videos like the one that gives the exhibition its title, the show centres on two of Rosler’s most important critical lines of work: politics as an ideological game of power and women’s bodies as privileged spaces summing up the ideologies of power and class.

Two lines of work that cross each other in the two last pieces: A Simple Case for Torture, or How to Sleep at Night (1983), on the complicity between the press and political totalitarianism, and Martha Rosler Reads ‘Vogue’ (1982), highlighting the alliance between the fashion industry and the exploitation of women workers.

Articulated in a hybrid language combining performance, texts, and media and documentary material, the works offer a lucid deconstruction exercise on the contradictions in our public and private surroundings. Describing her work, Rosler has said: ‘I want to make art about the commonplace, art that illumines social life.’